The Ptolemies who created the library at Alexandria had a suitably pharaonic vision: to bring every book that had ever been written under one roof. The latest attempt was led by scholars Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses. The manuscript offers a cornucopia of subjects for further study.Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?:įor two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. In fine, the compilation typifies both a time of transition, from the early to the high Middle Ages, and an intermediate milieu, between the monastic infirmary and the faculty of medicine. The majority of texts, however, evoke a practitioner guided by a rather autonomous medical tradition. An ecclesiastical provenance may be suggested by the presence, at the end, of hymns with musical notations and of miracle stories. Nevertheless, the volume seems designed for consultation rather than teaching. Interlinear and marginal notes foreshadow the Scholastic methods of gloss and commentary. Four of the texts correspond with works which the Salernitan masters were incorporating into a nuclear curriculum, later known in universities as Ars medicine or Articella. Mentions of Constantine, who became a Benedictine monk at Monte Cassino, and John Scarpellus "the Salernitan" (otherwise unknown) leave no doubt about southern Italian influences, yet there is no sign of the philosophical questions which were being discussed at the School of Salerno. Their fading reputations were soon to be eclipsed by the authority of Galen, which is still in the background here. The two authors most visible in the collection, Oribasius (fourth century) and Alexander of Tralles (sixth century), are Byzantines. 1087) presage the coming influx of translations from Arabic. The principal sources, including the Aphorisms with a commentary, are translated directly from Greek to Latin at the same time, writings by Isaac Israeli (d. Much attention is devoted to the virtues of simples and compounds, without the proliferation of substances that characterizes subsequent polypharmacy. Though it is less exclusively utilitarian than early Latin antidotaries or Anglo-Saxon leechbooks, its theoretical passages barely intimate the growing interest in speculation. The manuscript vividly documents an intermediate stage in the development of learned medicine. Treatment branches out into dietary advice plasters and other remedies, for afflictions ranging from migraine to snake bite magical cures, remarkably few herbals, glossaries of medicinal substances, and tables of weights and measures and, ultimately, manual intervention by bloodletting and surgery. Practical medicine figures more prominently in texts on diagnosis, particularly on reading pulses and urine prognosis, in the Hippocratic tradition as well as by astrology and divination and therapeutics, with several synopses for quick reference. The core treatise is the Hippocratic Aphorisms, the trunk from which sprang the theoretical and practical branches of the "Art of Medicine." Theory is represented, albeit sketchily, by anatomy, here primarily the conceptual "division of the body" physiology, constructed around humors and temperaments and nosology, with an inventory of diseases and their causes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |